I don’t agree necessarily that if you want to make games to use an existing engine in every case. For most cases it’s good advice.
But existing engines are so “general purpose” and full of assumptions about your game. Maybe your game requires different constraints?
Especially for 2D. For instance I’m building a game, powered by my custom game engine, that specifically focuses on performance and compression and no server or database in the loop.
My engine has very specific structure and assumptions about how my games must be structured, to reach pretty extreme performance and compression scenarios based on the constraints I set for myself and my game. (Hackernews post about it soon, I’m hoping next week)
I tried building my browser game so many times previously - first with unity, then godot, then react (lol!) - but having to learn the apis sucked, and the engines were not able to meet my extreme constraints (also attributed to me not being good with the engines). But looking back, I still don’t think what I’ve achieved internally would be possible without a custom ground up engine.
But I’ve learnt so much building my own engine and game.
Especially now with LLMs, I think it’s reasonable for experienced devs to try build their own custom game engines, it’s suddenly in reach for most developers.